[PK]

Originally Posted by Tirisilex

I'm just wondering if there is a specific rule about posting about movies and using those movies as inspiration for GURPS setting?

Definitely not. And as Sir_Pudding already pointed out, we have an entire book to help you with that.

I'm asking because on the Palladium Forums they dont allow you to talk about specific movies as inspiration for games or movie characters as characters.

I think you'll find that that's a quirk of Palladium. Most other RPG publishers, including us, are happy to talk about adapting existing fiction. In the very rare case that the owners of a specific property were to have an issue with it, we'd honor their requests, but that doesn't really happen. In fact, RyanW was right that the only thing we do ask people not to post here are conversions of Palladium products, for reasons that you're already aware of. :)

Originally Posted by RyanW

There are also rules against posting or linking to material that violates trademark or copyright. There's a "GURPS Ghostbusters" book that gets mentioned here from time to time that is a perfect example of how to violate both.

Right, but let me clarify that "GURPS Ghostbusters" would have been completely fine as a fanbook if it were original content comprising guidelines for using GURPS to adapt the Ghostbusters movies and setting. Our online policy (worth reading!) explicitly allows fans to create free original content, with just a few simple caveats.

The trouble with "GURPS Ghostbusters" is that nearly the entire book was cut-and-pasted directly from existing RPG books! Whole sections of GURPS Horror, GURPS All-Star Jam, and other GURPS books were lifted -- but that was secondary to the fact that virtually all of WEG's original Ghostbusters RPG text was copy-pasted into the book. And on top of that, the author broke our "please don't copy our trade dress or otherwise mislead people into thinking your book is an official SJ Games product" rule -- which had led to people blaming us for the blatant copyright infringement.

Basically, we just ask that you don't post big chunks of copyrighted text here, or incorporate copyrighted text into your own fan works. There's a bit more to the online policy, but that's the only rule which makes us mad if broken; anything else is more of a "lets give 'em a heads up here" situation.